What Good Guys Want
by Reki
Summary: The life of the Edo-jo Oniwabanshuu after the Bakumatsu. Rated R for language and frank discussion of sex.


What Good Guys Want  
Chapter 1 of a Rurouni Kenshin fanfic  
by Reiko Nagase  
  
===  
  
tashika ni hitotsu no jidai ga owaru no wo   
I saw the end of an era  
boku wa kono me de mita yo   
with my own eyes.  
dakedo tsugi ga jibun no ban datte koto ha  
But I didn't want to know  
shiritakunakatta n da  
that it's my turn next.  
  
-Excerpt from "Duty", by Ayumi Hamasaki  
  
===  
  
While waiting to do our first big job, we kept ourselves busy in our tree. Rock's up high on a sturdy branch, dying on a tobacco cigarette. Ugly and Virgin, two skinny guys but with one shorter than the other, squeezed together on a lower branch. Ugly is playing around with a pocketwatch we picked last night. Virgin, on the outside of the branch, is flipping though some shun-ga; occasionally, he checks the horizon to make sure that we don't have any unwanted visitors. Down near the base of the tree is Fatty and myself. Fatty yawns, and picks his teeth while looking into an old mirror we found in a dump somewhere. "Shit, and I just brushed my teeth," he says. Myself, I'm just trying to stay cool as we wait; I'm looking through a portfolio of someone that has the same name as mine.  
  
I found that portfolio two weeks ago on the night Virgin finally got laid for the first time. I bragged to the guys about it, but they just said, "It's no fucking big deal, Moody." Yeah, but the family name is written different than mine, I tried to tell them, but they didn't care. That night we tried to help Virgin out, because it was his 16th birthday.  
  
We hitched a ride to the red-light district down in Yoshiwara, and each of us put out a couple mon for Virgin, then we dropped him off at this greenhouse that Rock went to all the time. We told Virgin to go in there and get some of those shits that he couldn't seem to stop talking about. "We'll be back in an hour, so don't spill your seeds too quick and waste our money," said Rock to Virgin before we all went to the local theatre house to take in a show. Shit. We laughed so hard when we saw how nervous Virgin looked, chin down and hands in pockets and all.  
  
After we spent all of our cash at burlesque shows to see what must be the ugliest women on earth, we didn't really know what else to do, so Ugly suggested we should find a cafe to kick back and check out better-looking babes to redeem what we just saw. Good idea. Fucking Ugly always has big vision. So we hopped into a crowded cafe nearby called Mamezou. We sat next to the window checking people in and out. Damn. That cafe had a lot of really nice girls and some of them even smiled at me, but they all looked at us like a bunch of freaks. What else is new. And then, bam, I looked at an empty table next to us and there it was. A brown portfolio was resting on a black chair, as visible a fat cow put out to pasture back in the country. I walked over and picked it up. I opened the thick leather cover and looked inside. It was filled with appointments, names, addresses, and the occasional birthday and a lot more. On the front page, I couldn't believe it when I saw my own name -- Shinomori Aoshi. Well, everything was the same except for the family name, which was written with the characters for 'tiger' and 'forest', unlike mine.  
  
This guy Shinomori lives up near the mountains, near the old royal district. He's quite anal. He wrote down every little detail like how many bags of rice to buy for next week and how much to pay the gardener every two weeks to upkeep his koi pond when he could do it himself. I mean he even noted the addresses of the shops his wife goes to. Tokiko is her name. I wonder what she sees in him. But Shinomori is a doctor, I think, since he has the addresses of every local apothecary and doctor withing a fifty-mile radius. He even has a boarder in his mansion named Takani Ryosuke. Takani has a young daughter named Megumi. Shinomori must be a geek to write that down.  
  
I read the portfolio over and over. The words make me smile and sick at the same time, like when I've smoked too much and my head feels like air and everything around me seems like a painting, and then I'd say, "What the fuck am I doing in this picture?"  
  
---  
  
"Rock, pass me the cigarette," I say.  
  
Rock gives me his lit cig and I take a long draw. I hold it in my lung for as long as I can and blow it right into Ugly's face so he would stop messing around with his stupid mask.  
  
"Motherfucker," spits Ugly. He takes the tobacco from me and pulls a breath. He lets it out in Virgin's face.  
  
Virgin squints his eyes and pulls his jacket lapel over his nose.   
  
"C'mon, Virgin. Take one breath with us," Ugly says.  
  
"Stop calling me that!" Virgin squeals.   
  
So Ugly hands the cigarette back to Rock, who takes a draw the manly way -- at the corner of his lips. Then Rock drops the cigarette to Fatty. And Fatty pulls one, two, three quick breaths in a row. He joins his hands at the flesh between his thumbs and index fingers, puts it to his mouth and flicks his tongue. From here, it looks like he's tongueing some chick's vagina, and her cunt's farting out smoke. We all fucking laugh so hard.  
  
"All you crazy assholes are going to die before me," Virgin states.  
  
All of us would probably die before Virgin even if we didn't smoke, because he is the youngest in our group. But so what? We are all going to die anyway, no matter how strong we are. Even Oda Nobunaga died, all right? But Virgin is raised in a nice family so he supposedly knows what's good and bad for him. Of all of our folks, Virgin's are the only ones still alive and working. His parents have real jobs, I mean jobs that require you to pay taxes and shits. I don't know what the fuck happened to Virgin, but he likes to tag along with us all the time. Maybe he was dropped on his head, or maybe he was born toes first. Maybe he's fucking bored and gets his kicks hanging with a bunch of roughnecks like us. I don't know. Shit, why should I keep track of my friends like this Shinomori keeps tracks of lunch appointments with his workers and friends. All I know is that Virgin was a virgin when we first met him, and now he's not anymore, but he still talks like one. He doesn't talk much about anything unless it's related to sex. He'd rather show me some nasty pornographic shun-ga than help me with a map. When we once hitched a ride on the Tokaido road, he saw green hills with brown cows and that reminded him of large breasts with freckles. And lately Virgin tries to persuade Rock to take him back to the greenhouse for some new action. Virgin said the first time was too quick. He was nervous and had a hard time getting it up. But the girl put a sheepskin over his thing with her mouth and that got it up real fast. She knew it was Virgin's first time, so she tricked him. She rode on top of him and yelled, "Touch me, boy! Touch me!" And Virgin did and came right away. Now he wants another shot. He yearns for it like a virgin. So Virgin is a virgin no matter what, like we're all going to die no matter what, so why not just fucking smoke, man.  
  
"Shinomori, you are late today," Ugly says as he observes the horse-drawn carriage coming out of the Western-style house. Though we're hiding about a block away, I can see Shinomori in the rear carriage through the window. He looks nothing like me. He wears that nice white trenchcoat I've lusted over ever since we watched him over two weeks ago. Tokiko sits beside him. Her long hair outlines her face into the shape of a pear.  
  
The carriage speeds away. Several times we had followed it all the way to the merchant district, where it would stop in front of a potter's shop. Shinomori and Tokiko would move out and cross the street in carrying thier respectable doctor's satchels. They work in the same Western-style hospital, tall enough to make the sky jealous. Perhaps that is were they met for the first time.  
  
"I dig his trenchcoat," Rock says. "You love it too, don't you, Virgin?"  
  
"Yeah," nods Virgin. "And don't fucking call me that!"  
  
"I like his wife better. She's classy," Fatty snickers. "What's her name again, Moody?"  
  
"Tokiko."  
  
"Tokiko, that's right. I would love to whisper sweet words in her ears and make her fall in my arms like a storm," says Fatty.  
  
"She'd never go for your routine," says Virgin.  
  
"Of course she would, 'cause I can give her what she wants. I'll bring her poetry and passion. She's a beautiful sunflower, but is it anything without the sun? I'll show her the flame of love."  
  
We all shake out head. Fatty is no shadow when it comes to girls. His bright clear eyes above that slight underbite chin and his paunch Buddha-belly glitter in the hearts of any virgins. Whatever. "It's the communication that counts," Fatty once said. "Chicks dig it when I recite my dad's poems as I pop the zits on their back." I don't know how Fatty get this far with girls, but he does have a rather strange addiction. Before he makes love to any girl, he likes to take her clothes off, well yeah, and roll her around on the bed or on the floor or whatever, and he'd search for acne on her body. Yeah, acne, zits, pimples, white heads, fish eyes, whatever you want to call them. And if Fatty finds any, he pops them with his fingernails. "Those things get in the way." And as he performs this peculiar ritual on his lover, he soothes her pain by reciting his dad's old poetry that Fatty sneaks out from old boxes from his dead mother's closet. Fatty told me that when his dad saw his mom for the first time while slavering over a cold bowl of kakegori (shaved ice) that he bought from a street vendor on a hot summer's day, his dad immediately lost his sweet tooth. He fell in love at first sight. He quickly offered her his strawberry-flavored kakegori, since he was a bold young onmitsu. She accepted, and he wasted no time asking for her address. Many years in the Oniwabanshu after that brief encounter, Fatty's dad wrote to his mom constantly. Those letters were mostly love poems, verse after verse, yearning for heavy heartaches and feathery dreams. And now Fatty, thier son, recites those words while snapping pimples on his girlfriends. It's a strange way of preserving poetry.  
  
"That's cool. Now there's only the Takanis left," says Virgin.   
  
"I'm tired of waiting, man! Let's just go and get it over with," nags Rock. "I say we just bust in there now and tie them down. And if they don't tell us where they hide all of thier good shits, then we'll tickle them to death."  
  
Everybody chuckles, although what Rock said wasn't exactly funny.  
  
"No, it's still early. Let them water thier plants first," says Ugly as he scratches under his mask. "Good timing is the best weapon."  
  
"Before we go in, everybody should rub Fatty's stomach for good luck," says Virgin.  
  
"Fuck you." And Fatty turns his head away.  
  
==  
  
tsuzuku...  
end What Good Guys Want Chapter 1  
  
Author's end notes:  
If you haven't figured it out by now, Rock=Shikijou, Ugly=Hannya, Fatty=Hyottoko, Virgin=Beshimi, Moody=Aoshi.  
  
Rurouni Kenshin and all associated characters and settings owned by a corporation with more money than I do. "Duty" is copyrighted by Ayumi Hamasaki and another corporation with even more money. 


End file.
